SEO Techniques

Link Types are important because they matter most in PR calculation and the quality of links means better websites linking to your website that could be translated in high quality traffic that could give higher percentage of conversion into sales.

It is associated with Link typing which is defined as the assignment of a link to a particular category in order to give a human or automated reader a clue about the implications of traversing that particular link. It would be more accurately termed “link categorization,” because it has very little to do with the computer science notion of data typing: the assignment of a type to data to identify the set of operations that can be performed on that data (integers can be added, subtracted, multiplied, divided; strings can’t, but can be concatenated, have substrings extracted, etc.). Link typing clearly adds value to a link, and anyone discussing it agrees that it’s a Good Thing.

According to SEO News, there are 12 types of Links these are as follows:

1. Authority links
How to obtain them: Start with your related category in the Google Directory
What to look for:
-Top rankings for big terms - city or state + real estate, vertical category + lawyers
-Sites that currently offer links out
-Sites that would benefit from offering users your content
Examples: real estate law
Other Notes: Authority links are an absolute must for improving your trust score these days. This is a MUST for a new site, and should be where you start your efforts, and always be dedicating SOME time. Suck it up, and take the time it takes to get some quality, trusted links. The existence of trusted authority links will make or break your site. Find the 800 lb. gorillas in your field, and **find a way to get on a dozen or so of them. Failing that, hunt their backlinks, and find a way to get on some of those pages. Use some creative queries with the combination tool. Give the tattler a shot.

**Find a way - How? - Buy, borrow, beg, and barter.

2. Directory links
How to obtain them: Pony up some cash
What to look for: Generally easy to find niche directories, don’t go overboard with more than a few directories per month, quarter, etc.
Examples:law directories, real estate directories
Other Notes: My gut feel is that too many directories triggers a filter. I wouldn’t go over 10 - 15% of my total link ratio on my own sites for my own sites at any given time. Start with a few highly trusted directories. (Yahoo dir, business.com, MSN SBD, BOTW), and add some others after you have many more links added to your profile.

3. Reciprocal links
How to obtain them: Make some friends - Don’t go overboard
What to look for: Strong links that are complementary to your site.
Examples: Private investigators may be useful to a client that is in need of information on real estate law. Focus on content for your niche, and use your resources to build strategic linking partnerships.
Other Notes: Reciprocal links are NOT dead - relying on reciprocal links is. They are not a magic bullet anymore, but they do occur “naturally”. They are a piece of the equation - use them to your advantage but don’t get carried away. Using a number out of the sky (read: untested) - I would say under 10% of most sites links should be reciprocal - make them count.

4. Run of site links
How to obtain them: Easy to buy
What to look for: Sites that are highly on topic to you.
Examples: You’re on your own on this one - not outing anybody - sorry.
Other Notes: ROS links can spell trouble, but they can also help to balance your equation. If MOST of your links are from unique IP’s/domains - you can get add a couple, and get some great anchor text easily. Make sure to use some specific 2nd tier keyphrases that you might be able to hit some rankings for. Caveat: ROS links can really hurt a site’s link profile if not used wisely. Use with caution.

5. One way links from friends or related sites.
How to obtain them: Go to conferences and tradeshows, e-mail folks and make friends, offer something useful in return.
What to look for: People in complementary niches
Examples:Blogrolls
Other Notes: Don’t link ALL your sites together and stay on topic.

6. Edu and .Gov links
How to obtain them: Be nice to future interns. Offer some career assistance and/or advice.
What to look for: .edus and .gov TLD extensions - Da ‘hoo recently changed some things to use siteexplorer, so most the good tools broke (sorry, I’m not a developer), but you can still used advanced search to restrict searches to these TLD types.
Examples: real estate law resources
Other Notes: There are plenty of ways to encourage .edu and .gov folks to link to you (mainly good content or resources). It should be noted that there is most likely NOT special weight on these TLD’s, but they generally have much more trust score associated with them because they are generally of higher quality.

7. Radio station, television, magazine, or newspaper links
How to obtain them: Buy ‘em, or find a journalist
What to look for: Local news or someone looking to write a story.
Examples: real estate law news
Other Notes: Do some traditional media advertising, and negotiate for some extra special link love.

8. Press release links
How to obtain them: Find sites that offer press release submission services and submit your NEWS (*note - this does not mean any crap you just want to link stuff)
What to look for: People in your niche who want news as content.
Examples: PR.com, PRWeb.com, and many more
Other Notes:Press releases are generally NOT a great way to get links, but you can pick up some that may be of value. Every little bit helps, and remember (again) this is only a small part of your overall link profile.

9. Article bio links
How to obtain them: Write a few articles, or have some written for you. Rinse, repeat.
What to look for: Industry authority sites that accept submissions from guest writers
Examples: “real estate law” + “submit articles”
Other Notes:
This can be a GREAT way to get some good authority links from high profile sites. They’ll appreciate (or demand) great content in return for the exposure and link pop you’ll receive. The better the site is, the higher quality content they will require. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

10. RSS/ Blog aggregated links
How to obtain them: Pretty easy - start your blog and aggregate - also known as scraper links.
What to look for: Blog and RSS directories to submit to, and tagging sites.
Examples:
Other Notes: Not worth a whole lot, but you’ll pick up a whole bunch of links this way. They’re “power” is minimal at best and highly debated. There are, however, plenty of legitimate sites that aggregate content where you may pick up some decent links.

11. Comment and Profile Links
How to obtain them: Contribute to others websites - yes, REAL contributions.
Examples: Look for sites that don’t use the nofollow tag and show up in other folks backlinks.
How to obtain them: Contribute something worthwhile to a community or blog. Stick around awhile - don’t be a jerk and jus’ spam sites, you’ll probably get turned off or blocked anyhow.
What to look for: Sites without nofollow tags or redirects.
Examples: Sorry, you’re on your own, this is not hard.
Other notes: Not much to add, people have been using forum links, comment links, and profile links for a long time. Again, these links’ value is marginal, and only a very small piece of the puzzle.

12. Presell Page Links
How to obtain them: Obtaining presell pages takes link negotiations to a whole new level. Good luck outsourcing this. There are opportunities to purchase presell pages.
What to look for: Sites open to advertising that aren’t going crazy with it. Look for the happy medium.

This is a great advice from an expert!

Everyone is after some easy ways to increase the traffic to his website. Because your online business is directly dependant on your website traffic. If you 100 people are visiting your website then usually 1-2 of them will be your customers or will do some purchase.

To increase your website traffic a great place is “Yahoo Answers”: ( http://answers.yahoo.com/ )

Here are some tips how to use this place to advertise your website:

1) Join. Its free. If you have a yahoo account, you just need to login.
2) First of all choose the category or categories which best suit your website theme.
3) In start just read the questions and answers asked and answered by other members.
4) Especially look at the best answers.
5) Start answering the latest questions asked by community of your category.
6) Give the brief and complete answers.
7) There is a resources box which you can see while answering. Post the link of your website in this box.
If you dont know some answer then simple google and you will find the instant information.
9) Reply at least 20 questions daily.

If you follow all these things, after one month, you will have::

a) 600 backlinks to your website.
b) Extra daily clicks to your website. If your answers are normal then expect 5-10 visits per day. If you are giving great info to community, you can expect, like 20-30 or more from this website.
c) This will increase your revenue.
d) For every answer you will get 2 points on yahoo answers.
e) If your answer is awarded the “best answer” award,you will get 10 points.
f) Depending on your points, your quota of answering questions is increased.

source: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=852000#post7872252

Keyword Tools are essential tools if you are interested to know how many searches has been made using your chosen keyword, how it ranks among other related keywords, how many users has clicked on the paid advertisements using the keyword or the keyword click-conversion rate.

Why are these information essential? Well if you are obviously concern about how you can promote your site and make some money out of, the best way of getting a lot of visitors is from search engines. So you must find a way to rank higher against your competitors. In other words acquiring this knowledge of SEOing gives you the competitive advantage.

There are quite a number of tools out there on the internet that enables you to know the above mentioned information.One of such keword suggestion tools is Digital Points Keyword Suggestion Tool.

No matter what business you are in, Wordtracker will tell you the words people use when they search - and how popular each word is.

With a Wordtracker subscription, you will be able to:

* Optimize your website content by using the most popular keywords for your product and services
* Generate thousands of relevant keywords to improve your organic and PPC search campaigns
* Research online markets, find niche opportunities and exploit them before your competitors

In short, your search engine ranking will soar, you’ll get more visits to your website and more people will buy your products.

Latent Semantic Analysis(LSA) is a method to anlyze a webpage keyword density by statistical analysis. LSA analyzes word-word, word-passage, and passage-passage relationships.

 LSA is an automatic mathematical algorithm for extracting relationships in word usage in passages. It doesn’t use dictionaries, external knowledge, or grammar rules. First, represent words as a matrix, each row is a word, and each column is a text passage or context. Next, do a preliminary transformation of the matrix. Each word frequency in the matrix is weighted by a function. Next, LSA applies sigular value decomposition (SVD) to the matrix, which is factor analysis. The decomposition results in dimensionality reduction. Extract words from the passage into a word matrix, do a linear decomposition of the matrix, then reduce the dimensionality of the matrix. The LSA matrix adds words not in the passage, like human minor knowledge acqusition. LSA is intuitively sensible, with a three-fourths gain in total comprhension vocabulary inferred from knowledge about words not in the passage or paragraph. Human children have a rapid growth of vocabulary and knowledge. Humans draw conclusions from missing data. Reducing the dimensionality of representation is usefulwhen the representation matches the data. The data should not be perfectly regenerated. The similarity of dimensionality reduction is the cosine between vectors.

In layman’s terms, if you will use LSA to check your keyword density, you must follow these steps:

1. Make sure that the keyword is highlighted on the title(apply the basic SEO Principles)
2. Keyword Density does not necessarily means that you will have to keep on inserting your keywords in every paragraph, search engines are not that stupid, you might even distroy your pr rankings, what search engines look for are words that has something to do with your keywords. So the more words related to your keyword, the higher ratings you get.

Maybe you are wondering why you still have very few backlinks being detected by major search engines although you know that you have advertised in several websites and posted several topics about your blogs in as many forums as you can not to mention the comments you posted in just as many blogs as you possibly could but until now, all your efforts are worthless because the major search engines has yet to detect them and hence your ranking has stagnated.

Well, worry no more and let your frustrations be in the trash where it belongs because there is way to overcome this by telling the major search engines that you have new backlinks. How? Well, pinging Google and other search engines is just the same as telling them that you have just updated your blog or website. You can do the same thing by instead of just entering your url, you can enter the url where your link is located. You must ping them regularly until all your backlinks has been recognized. This also applies if you have technocrati or feedburner.

1. Commit yourself to the process. SEO isn’t a one-time event. Search engine algorithms change regularly, so the tactics that worked last year may not work this year. SEO requires a long-term outlook and commitment.

2. Be patient. SEO isn’t about instant gratification. Results often take months to see, and this is especially true the smaller you are, and the newer you are to doing business online.

3. Ask a lot of questions when hiring an SEO company. It’s your job to know what kind of tactics the company uses. Ask for specifics. Ask if there are any risks involved. Then get online yourself and do your own research—about the company, about the tactics they discussed, and so forth.

4. Become a student of SEO. If you’re taking the do-it-yourself route, you’ll have to become a student of SEO and learn as much as you can. Luckily for you, there are plenty of great Web resources (like Search Engine Land) and several terrific books you can read. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, Jennifer Laycock’s Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin are three I’ve read and recommend.

5. Have web analytics in place at the start. You should have clearly defined goals for your SEO efforts, and you’ll need web analytics software in place so you can track what’s working and what’s not.

6. Build a great web site. I’m sure you want to show up on the first page of results. Ask yourself, “Is my site really one of the 10 best sites in the world on this topic?” Be honest. If it’s not, make it better.

7. Include a site map page. Spiders can’t index pages that can’t be crawled. A site map will help spiders find all the important pages on your site, and help the spider understand your site’s hierarchy. This is especially helpful if your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu. If your site is large, make several site map pages. Keep each one to less than 100 links. I tell clients 75 is the max to be safe.

8. Make SEO-friendly URLs. Use keywords in your URLs and file names, such as yourdomain.com/red-widgets.html. Don’t overdo it, though. A file with 3+ hyphens tends to look spammy and users may be hesitant to click on it. Related bonus tip: Use hyphens in URLs and file names, not underscores. Hyphens are treated as a “space,” while underscores are not.

9. Do keyword research at the start of the project. If you’re on a tight budget, use the free versions of Keyword Discovery or WordTracker, both of which also have more powerful paid versions. Ignore the numbers these tools show; what’s important is the relative volume of one keyword to another. Another good free tool is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, which doesn’t show exact numbers.

10. Open up a PPC account. Whether it’s Google’s AdWords or Yahoo’s Search Marketing or something else, this is a great way to get actual search volume for your keywords. Yes, it costs money, but if you have the budget it’s worth the investment. It’s also the solution if you didn’t like the “Be patient” suggestion above and are looking for instant visibility.

11. Use a unique and relevant title and meta description on every page. The page title is the single most important on-page SEO factor. It’s rare to rank highly for a primary term (2-3 words) without that term being part of the page title. The meta description tag won’t help you rank, but it will often appear as the text snippet below your listing, so it should include the relevant keyword(s) and be written so as to encourage searchers to click on your listing. Related bonus tip: You can ignore the Keywords meta altogether if you’d like; it’s close to inconsequential. If you use it, put misspellings in there, and any related keywords that don’t appear on the page.

12. Write for users first. Google, Yahoo, etc., have pretty powerful bots crawling the web, but to my knowledge these bots have never bought anything online, signed up for a newsletter, or picked up the phone to call about your services. Humans do those things, so write your page copy with humans in mind. Yes, you need keywords in the text, but don’t stuff each page like a Thanksgiving turkey. Keep it readable.

13. Create great, unique content. This is important for everyone, but it’s a particular challenge for online retailers. If you’re selling the same widget that 50 other retailers are selling, and everyone is using the boilerplate descriptions from the manufacturer, this is a great opportunity. Write your own product descriptions, using the keyword research you did earlier (see #9 above) to target actual words searchers use, and make product pages that blow the competition away. Plus, retailer or not, great content is a great way to get inbound links.

14. Use your keywords as anchor text when linking internally. Anchor text helps tells spiders what the linked-to page is about. Links that say “click here” do nothing for your search engine visibility.

15. Build links intelligently. Submit your site to quality, trusted directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva, and Best of the web. Seek links from authority sites in your industry. If local search matters to you (more on that coming up), seek links from trusted sites in your geographic area—the Chamber of Commerce, etc. Analyze the inbound links to your competitors to find links you can acquire, too.

16. Use press releases wisely. Developing a relationship with media covering your industry or your local region can be a great source of exposure, including getting links from trusted media web sites. Distributing releases online can be an effective link building tactic, and opens the door for exposure in news search sites. Related bonus tip: Only issue a release when you have something newsworthy to report. Don’t waste journalists’ time.

17. Start a blog and participate with other related blogs. Search engines, Google especially, love blogs for the fresh content and highly-structured data. Beyond that, there’s no better way to join the conversations that are already taking place about your industry and/or company. Reading and commenting on other blogs can also increase your exposure and help you acquire new links. Related bonus tip: Put your blog at yourdomain.com/blog so your main domain gets the benefit of any links to your blog posts. If that’s not possible, use blog.yourdomain.com.

18. Use social media marketing wisely. If your small business has a visual element, join the appropriate communities on Flickr and post high-quality photos there. If you’re a service-oriented business, use Yahoo Answers to position yourself as an expert in your industry. With any social media site you use, the first rule is don’t spam! Be an active, contributing member of the site. The idea is to interact with potential customers, not annoy them.

19. Take advantage of local search opportunities. Online research for offline buying is a growing trend. Optimize your site to catch local traffic by showing your address and local phone number prominently. Write a detailed Directions/Location page using neighborhoods and landmarks in the page text. Submit your site to the free local listings services that the major search engines offer. Make sure your site is listed in local/social directories such as CitySearch, Yelp, Local.com, etc., and encourage customers to leave reviews of your business on these sites, too.

20. Take advantage of the tools the search engines give you. Sign up for Google’s webmaster Central and Yahoo’s Site Explorer to learn more about how the search engines see your site, including how many inbound links they’re aware of.

21. Diversify your traffic sources. Google may bring you 70% of your traffic today, but what if the next big algorithm update hits you hard? What if your Google visibility goes away tomorrow? Newsletters and other subscriber-based content can help you hold on to traffic/customers no matter what the search engines do. In fact, many of the DOs on this list—creating great content, starting a blog, using social media and local search, etc.—will help you grow an audience of loyal prospects and customers that may help you survive the whims of search engines.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/070628-074149.php

Linkbaiting is a big topic for discussion lately. Everyone wants and needs links. We can ask for links, buy links or create articles and submit them for one way links. Linkbaiting is about getting links without doing any of these. Linkbaiting is essentially baiting people in by creating something they want to link to. So, what could we use to bait people into linking to you?

Podcasting: Creating a podcast that discusses news, tips or information on your industry is great baiting tool. Making your podcast unique and consistent is the key to steady stream of new links.

Interviews: These are great. If you could interview someone well known in your industry, that would certainly be worth linking to. For an added boost, do the interview on your podcast and then transcribe it.

Awards: Awards are another way to bring in traffic, though you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) simply make up an award. It has to have criteria, high standards and most importantly, meaning. If you give awards to everyone who applies, your award will seem insignificant and unimportant. The upside is you can gain a lot of traffic and one way links from award winners.

Tools and games: These will always be popular. Create a new tool for your industry that is legitimately helpful or develop a game related to your industry that is either informative or amusing. Firefox or wordpress plugins will bring steady traffic for a long time.

Content: Content is the easiest of all to create. Articles and blog posts are a great way to go about linkbaiting. You need to use your imagination to make your post compelling. Keeping on top of news and current affairs will help you pick a topic that people are already interested in. There is nothing wrong with piggy backing on some top stories if it relates to what you do.

With basic itil certification, one can easily go about ccie as well as the more advanced credits like cwna. However prior to getting a mcdba certification, it is important to have a mcsd on his credit. In either cases, cisco training cannot be attempted at any stage.

Video: The is becoming one of the fastest forms of link baiting, in my opinion. Creating a funny or informative video can create quiet a buzz.

Giveaways and contests: These are great for a quick boost in traffic. However, these are also short lived. Giveaways need to have an associated monetary value. Contests, unless they are monthly, will die along with the links after the contest is over.

Blogs and forums: These are usually overlooked as a form of linking baiting, but they are one of the earliest forms of link baiting. Nothing says “link to me” more than a forum or a blog. Proving they have something of interest for the readers.

Guest appearances: This is one I like to use. I like to exchange writings, interviews or ideas with other bloggers and podcasters. Let me post a post on your blog and you can post on mine for a cross promotion. It’s a great way to get a link as well. If you have a podcast, exchange advertisements with other casts along with a link on your podcast page.

Lists: List are very popular. Why? Well, because they are a list of something of value that people want, all in one place. I have a list of over 200 article submission sites to submit articles to, directories that you can submit your podcast to for free and free directories to get your site listed on. These are always my most often viewed posts.

Where to set your bait: Press releases and social networks are the best places to cast your line. Make an enticing headline and real in some hefty traffic.
If you try once a week to do some form of linkbaiting, by at least writing a topical post or putting together a lengthy list that readers will find useful, you will see a steady increase of traffic and hopefully links.

This article is from Mr SEO a full service SEO company. You can read their SEO articles. Visit their site for more of our services and free resources at http://www.mr-seo.com

Buying Links to build up your PR ranking is not bad nowadays but as time goes by, it is becoming a blackhat but still, a lot of websites with high PR rankings are really making money out of this trade and as google said Link Buying is already part of the internet economy so it is not bad. Some pointers in link buying as pointed out by Marketing Pilgrims are as follows:

1. Only buy links from sites that are highly relevant to your web site content. If you sell ring tones, that link from an online florist will stick out like a sore thumb!
2. If the site you are buying links from already has more than 5 paid links on the page, walk away.
3. If the site labels the links as “sponsored” or “paid links” or anything like hat, walk away.
4. Be selective in your targeting. Don’t buy footer or sidebar links if you can help it.
5. Vary your anchor text. Try to make your anchor text look natural. If you buy links on 100 pages, and they all use the same text, you’re asking for trouble.
6. Avoid any paid link where the seller is also an affiliate for the broker. Those “earn money selling links”banners? Yeah Google can see those too!
7. Check that the page ranks well for its targeted keywords. If it doesn’t rank well for its own keywords, it will likely not help you.
8. Point the links at different pages within your site. Don’t buy lots of links for your homepage.
9. Try to get the links in a contextual format. A link that is part of a highly relevant paragraph will be more valuable.
10. I guess I should round this out to ten. Don’t worry about buying PageRank. A brand new page may be highly relevant to your industry and rank well, yet the PR shows 0/10. Ignore that, PR takes forever to catch up.

Basically microsoft training prepares one for anything and everything, ranging from a+ certification to ccnp boot camp. Professionals with cisco certification to their credit find it hard to get adjusted to the tough requirements of mcsa course, but a mcp finds ccie as easy as abc.

Robot.txt is a text file that contains information that should tell the “bots” or spiders sent by search engines which part of your website is off limits.

Some examples are as follows:

This example allows all robots to visit all files because the wildcard “*” specifies all robots:
User-agent: *
Disallow:

This example keeps all robots out:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The next is an example that tells all crawlers not to enter into four directories of a website:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/

Example that tells a specific crawler not to enter one specific directory:
User-agent: BadBot
Disallow: /private/

Example that tells all crawlers not to enter one specific file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/file.html

Note that all other files in the specified directory will be processed.

Example demonstrating how comments can be used:
Comments appear after the “#” symbol at the start of a line, or after a directive
User-agent: * # match all bots
Disallow: / # keep them out

Compatibility

In order to prevent access to all pages by robots, do not use
Disallow: *
as this is not a stable standard extension.

Instead:
Disallow: /
should be used.

For more info on this topic check out wikipedia.

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Professionals done with security training are thinking of going  network+ now. The microsoft certification relevant to this has a certain prerequisites list. It needs a+ on the credit of the applicant. Only then can it take the professional under its wind. After a grueling mcsa boot camp, it will yield a valued mcp.

From here on in, we’ll occasionally refer to PageRank as “PR”.

Notes:
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.

How is PageRank calculated?

To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That’s the equation that calculates a page’s PageRank. It’s the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren’t telling us what it is. It doesn’t matter though, as this equation is good enough.

In the equation ‘t1 - tn’ are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

We can think of it in a simpler way:-

a page’s PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a “share” of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

“share” = the linking page’s PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.

A page “votes” an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it.

If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2,…..PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar. If so, it means that it takes a lot more additional PageRank for a page to move up to the next PageRank level that it did to move up from the previous PageRank level. The result is that it reverses the previous conclusion, so that a link from a PR8 page that has lots of outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR4 page that has only a few outbound links.

Whichever scale Google uses, we can be sure of one thing. A link from another site increases our site’s PageRank. Just remember to avoid links from link farms.

Note that when a page votes its PageRank value to other pages, its own PageRank is not reduced by the value that it is voting. The page doing the voting doesn’t give away its PageRank and end up with nothing. It isn’t a transfer of PageRank. It is simply a vote according to the page’s PageRank value. It’s like a shareholders meeting where each shareholder votes according to the number of shares held, but the shares themselves aren’t given away. Even so, pages do lose some PageRank indirectly, as we’ll see later.

Ok so far? Good. Now we’ll look at how the calculations are actually done.

For a page’s calculation, its existing PageRank (if it has any) is abandoned completely and a fresh calculation is done where the page relies solely on the PageRank “voted” for it by its current inbound links, which may have changed since the last time the page’s PageRank was calculated.

The equation shows clearly how a page’s PageRank is arrived at. But what isn’t immediately obvious is that it can’t work if the calculation is done just once. Suppose we have 2 pages, A and B, which link to each other, and neither have any other links of any kind. This is what happens:-

Step 1: Calculate page A’s PageRank from the value of its inbound links

Page A now has a new PageRank value. The calculation used the value of the inbound link from page B. But page B has an inbound link (from page A) and its new PageRank value hasn’t been worked out yet, so page A’s new PageRank value is based on inaccurate data and can’t be accurate.

Step 2: Calculate page B’s PageRank from the value of its inbound links

Page B now has a new PageRank value, but it can’t be accurate because the calculation used the new PageRank value of the inbound link from page A, which is inaccurate.

It’s a Catch 22 situation. We can’t work out A’s PageRank until we know B’s PageRank, and we can’t work out B’s PageRank until we know A’s PageRank.

Now that both pages have newly calculated PageRank values, can’t we just run the calculations again to arrive at accurate values? No. We can run the calculations again using the new values and the results will be more accurate, but we will always be using inaccurate values for the calculations, so the results will always be inaccurate.

The problem is overcome by repeating the calculations many times. Each time produces slightly more accurate values. In fact, total accuracy can never be achieved because the calculations are always based on inaccurate values. 40 to 50 iterations are sufficient to reach a point where any further iterations wouldn’t produce enough of a change to the values to matter. This is precisiely what Google does at each update, and it’s the reason why the updates take so long.

One thing to bear in mind is that the results we get from the calculations are proportions. The figures must then be set against a scale (known only to Google) to arrive at each page’s actual PageRank. Even so, we can use the calculations to channel the PageRank within a site around its pages so that certain pages receive a higher proportion of it than others.

NOTE:
You may come across explanations of PageRank where the same equation is stated but the result of each iteration of the calculation is added to the page’s existing PageRank. The new value (result + existing PageRank) is then used when sharing PageRank with other pages. These explanations are wrong for the following reasons:-

1. They quote the same, published equation - but then change it

from PR(A) = (1-d) + d(……) to PR(A) = PR(A) + (1-d) + d(……)

It isn’t correct, and it isn’t necessary.

2. We will be looking at how to organize links so that certain pages end up with a larger proportion of the PageRank than others. Adding to the page’s existing PageRank through the iterations produces different proportions than when the equation is used as published. Since the addition is not a part of the published equation, the results are wrong and the proportioning isn’t accurate.

According to the published equation, the page being calculated starts from scratch at each iteration. It relies solely on its inbound links. The ‘add to the existing PageRank’ idea doesn’t do that, so its results are necessarily wrong.